Creating and translating a company page on LinkedIn

As the economy continues to become digitalised, having a presence on social media is an increasingly important marketing strategy in today’s globalised world. If your company is a B2B with an international focus, that is, you offer your services or products to other companies worldwide, having a presence on LinkedIn is essential to make the most of the digital world. In this blog, I share my experience in managing the translation of our LinkedIn company page into four languages. As a translation agency with international clients, LinkedIn offers us a great opportunity to establish a communication channel with our current and potential clients in their language. I do not intend to reinvent the wheel. LinkedIn offers clear and concise help on how to create and translate a company page. However, I would like to explain how to get things right from the start, especially to avoid the common mistake of not having English as the main language of the company page. Having English as the default language is desirable when selling products to an international audience, whether you are an exporting company or a multinational.

1. Reasons to create an account in multiple languages

If you are reading this blog, you may already understand why it is worth translating a LinkedIn company page into several languages. These reasons may vary from case to case, but one thing is always true: foreign clients will feel more comfortable and receptive to reading our company's information if it is available in their native language. The fact that our page is in the language of our target audience will increase our chances of success in that market. A text written in our native language holds our attention longer and resonates with us at a deep emotional level.

LinkedIn currently supports the creation of a company page in 32 languages. However, we must consider and weigh the effort it may take to create and keep our page updated in multiple languages. So it may make sense to create a page only for those markets that are more important for our company, either due to their size or the strategically privileged position of our company in a niche market.

2. Beware of the LinkedIn account’s default language!

Before we see how to create our company page on LinkedIn, I want to highlight the importance of choosing the default language of our page. I highlight this because in this case, LinkedIn's help can mislead us and make us waste precious time. To illustrate this, I will take our translation company's page as an example. 

Our company page is in English and translated into French, German and Spanish. LinkedIn works in such a way that if a marketing director visits our page from their LinkedIn account in Spanish, they will see our page in Spanish. So far, so good. That's what we expect. But what will happen if a marketing director of a Chinese company visits us using LinkedIn’s interface in Chinese? In this case, since our company page is not translated into Chinese, LinkedIn will display the default language of our company page. In our case, it will display it in English. And that's what we want.

If our market is the world, the default language of our company page should be English. The problem with how LinkedIn currently works is that it will not ask us which default language we want to use. Therefore, we must do things in such a way that the default language is the one we want, which necessarily should be English if we are a company with an international focus.

3. First step: personal LinkedIn account

Before creating a company page on LinkedIn, we are first required to have a personal account. I imagine that if you are reading this entry, you already have it; if not, creating it is as easy as going to LinkedIn, clicking on “Join now” and following the indicated steps. If you prefer, click here to go to LinkedIn Help. But, be careful! LinkedIn will see the location where you connect from to offer you its interface in the language of your geographical area. So if you are in Spain, LinkedIn’s interface will be in Spanish. When you start creating your account from the Spanish interface, LinkedIn will not ask you for your preferred language and will assign Spanish as the default language of your account. 

As I previously mentioned, if your target market is the world and you are an Export Manager or an International Marketing Manager, what you will want is account to be in English. To ensure that the default language is English when registering on LinkedIn for the first time, go to the language menu located at the very bottom of the LinkedIn homepage and choose English, and then create the account following the steps in English. I'm afraid that if you already have a personal LinkedIn account, it's too late. As of the date of this blog entry, LinkedIn does not allow changing the account’s default language. Don't worry, this affects your personal page. You can still have English as the default language of the company page you manage.

4. How to create a company page on LinkedIn and choose the default language

Once we have our personal account, creating a company page on LinkedIn is quite easy. There are plenty of online tutorials that explain the process step by step, although the process itself is quite intuitive. However, here is a link to LinkedIn's official help on how to do it: How to create a LinkedIn page. Be careful with the default language of our company page! Again, just as with a personal account, LinkedIn won’t ask you to choose a primary language when creating a company page. It will simply assign the language based on your interface settings at the time of creation.

Even if you have read this blog late and your personal account is not set to English, it is still possible to create the company page and make its main language English. To do this, simply choose within your account that LinkedIn’s interface is displayed in English and then create the company page. Now, when a visitor uses LinkedIn in one of the possible 32 languages and a translated version is not available in their language, your page will be displayed in English.

Unlike your personal account, the default language of the company page can be changed at any time. So if you already have a page created and want to change the default language, edit the page and go to “Language Management”, and choose the default language you want to set. At the end of this page, the option “Set as default language” will appear:

5. Translation of the company page into multiple languages

Once you have created your company page, you may want to translate it for foreign markets that are very important to your company. To be able to upload the translated texts, you simply need to edit the page. To do this, you can access it from the main menu of your personal account and go to manage the company page. Once there, click on edit:

A window will open from which you can access “Language Management” and you will see the option to “Add language”:

By clicking on the “Add language” option, the following window will appear, where we can choose one of the 32 languages that LinkedIn currently supports:

6. Important aspects to consider when translating the company page

6.1. Do not use machine translation

Naturally, as a translation company, we cannot fail to emphasise the importance of using a professional translation service or the appropriate native translators if we have an in-house translation team. 

If we are a company with fewer resources, we may be tempted to use Google Translate or other machine translation platforms like DeepL. Although these are great machine translation platforms, we cannot overlook that machine translation is not 100% reliable and that we may be introducing glaring errors into the translation of our company's text. Instead of attracting foreign clients, we will be giving them a good reason not to trust our company.

6.2. Adapt the translation if necessary

Another important aspect to consider when translating the company page is that the translation may need to be adapted to the particular circumstances of the target market. It may be that for strategic marketing reasons, the message we want to convey to our potential clients needs to be different in Germany than in France or Spain. In this case, it will be important for the translation to be reviewed by the international marketing team or the marketing director of the subsidiary (if you are a multinational), so that the content is perfectly adapted and aligned with the company's strategic objectives for that market.

7. Important aspects to consider when translating the company page

7.1. Unique logos and URLs for all markets

The world is far from perfect, and the same goes for LinkedIn regarding their tools that allow us to translate and adapt the company page. In the case of our translation company, we have created a different brand for the German, Spanish, French, Italian, and international (English) markets. Part of this approach to different local markets involves using an adapted logo and a website with a different domain. However, LinkedIn does not have the option to introduce logos or URLs adapted to local markets, so we will have to use the same ones for all markets.

This limits the ability to adapt the page to local markets. If we take the example of Burger King, we can see that they have a domain for the Spanish market, www.burgerking.es. However, its LinkedIn page shows the group's general website, www.bk.com, which leads to a website only in English. Which is far from ideal.

7.2. Inability to filter posts by language

Another frustrating aspect of LinkedIn is the inability to publish a post intended for a single market. Regardless of the language we use to make a publication, the various translations of this publication will appear for all users. This means that if we want to make a publication in the language of our potential clients, we have to publish it in all the corresponding languages. As a consequence, the publication loses its impact and lacks clarity for our potential clients, who will see various publications in languages they do not understand.

In our case, we use the LinkedIn company page to publish our website blogs in several languages. However, to avoid publishing a post in four languages, we have opted to publish in English and inform that the corresponding translation can be found on our website. 

8. Should you use one company page for all markets or multiple?

Given LinkedIn’s limitations regarding the translation and adaptation of content on the company page, we may wonder if it is better to create a company page for each market. This option resolves the limitations mentioned and addresses the case of multinational companies with local subsidiaries or exporting companies with different marketing strategies or different brands adapted to each market.

The main problem with this strategy is that it will increase management time and, above all, dilute the brand's strength. If we take the example of a multinational company in the field of dentistry like Dentsply Sirona, we will see that despite having dozens of subsidiaries worldwide, they present themselves as a single company headquartered in the United States. At the time of writing this blog, the company had 7,005 employees on LinkedIn. However, if each subsidiary had its own company page, we would see that some subsidiaries might have 80 employees. This undoubtedly generates a different brand message and undermines the image of a large multinational group.

9. Conclusion

LinkedIn is the most influential professional network in the digital world and, therefore, an essential tool to promote our company online and reach markets abroad in a simple way. Despite the limitations in translating our company page on LinkedIn, we have the option to present the translations of our page to clients and potential clients in their own language. We are sure that LinkedIn will continue to work to improve the configuration of multilingual company pages.